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Comment by dewitt | Hacker News Reader

Nice data visualizations. One thing I'd also like to see here is a representation for multiple majors (35% of Williams students are double majors).

Tangentially related, I was a little disappointed to see the slice for Computer Science is still so small. It was also small in mid-90's, and I believe it grew dramatically during the first dotcom boom, but it seems to have dropped back to the earlier levels.

Not that I think the CS program should get any easier just to attract more students (it was notoriously difficult for a while), but rather I think that CS can be the perfect science complement in a well-rounded liberal arts education.

Go Ephs.

View on HN

Nice to see another Eph on HN :)

I believe my year (2003) was the biggest CS class ever. Somewhere around 25-30; I forget the exact number.. I know it dipped in the couple years after that quite a bit, but not sure if it's picked up again.

Ha! You are dwarfed by the mighty Physics/Astro contingent. Except on HN, where you seem to outnumber us 2:1.

edit: now 3:1

2010 (my year) was about 7-10 I believe. And about half of those were double majors.

Edit: 13 majors, of which at least 10 were double majors (including me and Dave below).

Edit 2: Good grief. The whole lot on HN. Do any of us Ephs get any work done?

We actually had 13 CS majors in 2010: http://www.cs.williams.edu/people/alumni-directory/. That went up to 20 majors in the class of 2011, so the gradient is positive!

Woo 2011 Williams CS. Ok, that's my one comment on HN for the year.

Don't forget to send me your resumes, everyone: dewitt@google.com. : )

dammit Dewitt - stop stealing all the good ones with your fancy Google.com address...

Williams CS represent

Class of 2015 here! We have record numbers signed up for Algorithms in the spring, something like 30-40 and a lot of those people are planning to major.

Oh hi, class of 2001 here, Ephs represent! & get off my lawn etc etc etc.

Does Williams have an active ACM/CS club on campus?

How can they possibly have a whole department with so few students? Is it just math professors doubling up by teaching CS?

It's a real department with seven profs. Lots of non-majors take CS classes, but even so, class sizes are relatively small (usually in the 10 to 30 range). That's really one of the major selling points for the LAC model of education.

That is a lot of Ephs on HN! I've created a new Google+ community for current students, alumni, and faculty of the Williams College CS program:

https://plus.google.com/communities/103167291529744829090

Please ask for an invite if that's you.

At Bard College, we have recently begun offering CS intro courses that are juxtaposed with other disciplines. For instance, one of the most popular courses this semester was a CS called "Interactive Media" that had students learning Processing with the end result being they had to create a substantial piece of art (installation / visualizer / game) at the end of it. I also believe that next semester there is an intro course that is focused on using NLP (really basic stuff like N-grams, counting the number of word repetitions on a text) in conjunction with experimental poetry.

Its great because it gets the fundamentals of programming down while also allowing the students to attach it to their other interests. I love being able to talk to my art student friends about their projects and helping them with code. They are all really into it.

Hi Dewitt,

I think I know who you were and met you at Williams. I'm also a CS major and I graduated in the late 90's. It is indeed the case that the CS major grew absurdly huge in the late 90's, with my class being double the size of the previous year's class, and the class below me doubling in the size of my class. And with intro courses being yet more absurd. All of my memories of our profs involve them with big circles under their eyes, clutching mugs of coffee.

It says it does represent double majors, but probably not in any useful capacity that you were looking for: "Those with double-majors have two arcs on the left (one from each of their majors, each arc of 1/2 thickness) that combine into one resulting career choice."

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